Real Marriage_ The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and Life Together - Mark Driscoll [86]
Pride is the default mode of the human heart. As sinners, we are prone toward pride. It is a besetting sin and the root of all sin that we must continually seek to be conscious and repentant of. No one can claim they are humble, but as one author says, “I’m a proud man pursuing humility by the grace of God. No one can ever truly say he is humble, but we can at best only say we are proud people pursuing humility by the grace of God.”2
Throughout the Bible, pride is dealt with in the sternest of terms. God’s emotion toward pride is “hate.”d God’s action toward the proud is punishmente that includes “destruction” and “a fall.”f This explains why God said, “Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for 'God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.'a
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Looking to Jesus we see the clear connection between humility and being a servant. Philippians 2:3–8 says,
In lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself. Let each of you look out not only for his own interests, but also for the interests of others. Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself.
How have you humbled yourself to be a servant to your spouse? How has your spouse humbled herself or himself to be a servant to you? How have you refused to humbly serve your spouse? How has your spouse refused to humbly serve you?
If we do not choose humility, God will choose humiliation for us. So we must willfully, earnestly, and continually humble ourselves. We do this five ways in our marriages. First, we consider our spouses and their needs and desires above our own. Second, we are willing to do the thankless menial things that marriage requires as an act of love to our spouses and worship to our God. Third, we humbly receive instruction and correction from the Scriptures, Holy Spirit, godly spiritual leaders, godly friends, and our spouses. Fourth, we humbly seek to encourage and nurture the humble service we see in our spouses more continually and passionately than we criticize their faults, flaws, and failures. And fifth, we continually remember the humble servant Jesus was and is for us while asking the Holy Spirit to make us increasingly more like our humble Servant.
Selfishness begins in childhood. The more our parents coddle, accommodate, and center their lives around us, the more selfish we become. For those who were an only child, this propensity toward selfishness is often higher, as they did not have to share their toys, room, and life with siblings who inconvenienced them. And selfishness is often mastered during singleness. Then we marry, expecting our spouses to serve us humbly, only to find they were expecting the same thing. Conflict ensues along with disappointment and frustration.
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The pattern of selfishness is so deeply woven into the fabric of our lives that it takes years of marriage to even begin to deal with the problem and move from “me” to “we.” The experts tell us that no less than 50 percent of all marriages end in divorce by year seven.3 If you have ever heard of the seven-year itch, it is apparently true. While there can be biblical grounds for divorce, the painful truth is that most marriages end simply because of selfishness on the part of one or both spouses. Selfish people who divorce without dealing with their selfishness then remarry only to repeat the first seven years of selfishness with another person and are more likely to divorce yet again. Why? Because a selfish person who changes spouses has not changed his heart.
It takes between nine and fourteen years for a couple to become not entirely unselfish,